Is there one system that the Unreal Devs didn’t kick foliage to the curb on?
I mean it’s seriously like they just decided to drop one huge F-Bomb on foliage in general
I can definitely appreciate what you’re saying, and I’ve experienced the same frustration myself. That being said, I’m amazed they’ve even found a way to support foliage at all. Dynamic geometry is challenging to support in GI, as is transparency and masking, and especially deformation. Foliage is all of those things, in addition to being dense and a poor self-occluder, essentially the most challenging phenomenon lumen could possibly handle.
And even then, we’re getting support for improved transmission and GI in lumen. I’ve tested out experimental builds of the engine with the new features, and they look absurdly good for being in real-time. Depending on your settings you might get a little ghosting, a little noise, but by and large the final image holds up. I can’t argue that foliage isn’t a massive headache, but with what lumen can do now, the possibilities are just incredible.
1 Like
Thanks, that really goes a long way towards improving my moral right now…I can’t imagine the challenges they’ve faced with building these new systems…they are incredible and I don’t discount that, just frustrated because I want my scene to look great and I hate to have a problem and just have no way towards finding a solution or understanding the real issue causing it. It’s just that when it comes to these things there could be 100’s of things causing it so a lot of my Anxiety and Frustration comes from second guessing what the real issue is.
1 Like
You are really correct there. Foliage and lumen alone are both complex systems, and together they can be a nightmare. Unreal’s documentation is okay but it really doesn’t cover the full complexity and edge cases that come up. Part of what I’ve learned is lumen is sensitive to a lot of the nuances of foliage-how the meshes are made, how they’re carded, the materials and masking, the animation, all of it. It’s really easy to get a little mistake in that just FUBARs everything.
Good news: The new engine version appears to fix most of these issues. If you’re having problems currently, you do have a lot of quality levers and options available to you. If you have the time, type help into the content bar and read through the lumen CVars, many of them can offer solutions to some of your content issues, in exchange for a few trade-offs.
1 Like
Alright thanks man I’ll try that out and look forward to the first major update.
1 Like